Fall of the Qing Dynasty (1912, colorized) | China | Know Your Meme

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Year Date Event The Jiajing Emperor announces his intention to seclude himself for several 1540 September years to pursue immortality; a court official says this is nonsense and gets tortured to death [239]

E*** 我爱你 'Not many Westerners can say they've been on a Chinese TV show. Screenshot of the show, © Jiangsu TV, used with kind permission. How did an English Language Assistant from the UK working in China suddenly find himself before an audience of millions? Robbie Stanley-Smith tells us what he discovered during his moment in the spotlight. At the beginning of last November, a Chinese teacher and colleague at my school sent me a message on WeChat (the Chinese near- equivalent of WhatsApp) asking if I was looking for a girlfriend in China. There followed an application and an interview for a TV show. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.

WAYS THAT ARE DARK THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINA Ways That Are Dark: The Truth About China is a 1933 non-fiction book by Ralph Townsend which presented his observations on the state of then-contemporary China. Townsend served as a US consul in Shanghai and Fuzhou between 1931 and 1933. In the first two chapters he describes the atrocious conditions he witnessed in China. Shanghai is depicted as a squalid, noisy, and polluted den of crime, poverty, and disease, and yet still comparatively wealthy compared to the rest of the country. The interior of the country is difficult to access due to lack of infrastructure, is mostly unsafe for travel, and is wracked constantly by famine and starvation. Townsend had asserted in chapter one that the cause of China's present misery lies in the fundamental defects that exist in the ethnic characteristics of the Chinese people and in chapters three and four he explains what he believes these defects are. Townsend states that dishonesty is "the most prominent characteristic in the Chinese mentality as opposed to our own". Townsend gives many examples of him being lied to by Chinese employees, coolies, shopkeepers, and government officials, and notes that many other consuls were driven out of the service by this relentless and "aimless lying, with each lie merely a pretext for another". The other highly salient trait of the Chinese is their "indifference to fellow suffering". Through a large number of personal and second-hand anecdotes, Townsend argues that the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are completely unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude toward other people. Because the Chinese feel no empathy toward others, they behave in an unbelievably sadistic and cruel fashion toward one another, and they view altruistic foreigners as targets to be mercilessly taken advantage of. Other traits Townsend identifies as being typically Chinese are cowardice, lust for money, lack of a sense of personal hygiene, lack of critical thinking skills, insincerity, and obsession with hollow rites. Townsend believes that these traits are as notable among China's leaders and educated strata as much as they are in the poor masses, and his analysis of historical documents leads him to believe that they are not a recent product of the present chaos, but rather are deeply ingrained traits of China's national character. He concludes that the "outstanding characteristics" of the Chinese people "neither enable other peoples to deal satisfactorily with them, nor enable the Chinese to deal satisfactorily with themselves." pages 40-41 A sort of moldy desolation, withal surrounded by animation, stares at you everywhere in China. In spite of their industry, in the sense of always puttering about, the Chinese are without doubt the most slipshod people on earth. The common huts are always about to fall to pieces, a not infrequent occurrence. Their roofs leak, and the mud walls are usually cracked and partly knocked to pieces. Mending anything before the imminent danger of its falling upon his head, or upon his livestock (a more important concern), would be unthinkable to a Chinese. Even the premises of the well-to-do are almost invariably in an advanced state of disrepair, though the family has an abundance of money for luxuries. Many tourists who have fed their knowledge on vague ideas of Eastern splendors have failed to delimit the geographical applications, and expect to find in China the sort of man-made glories that belong to India. China has no temples to compare with those to be seen elsewhere in the Orient. The pagodas are a little better, but most of them are crumbly affairs, with no stonework or decoration of any special quality. They are simply towers in the Chinese manner. The blending of intricacy with magnitude, as seen in India and North Africa, is nowhere in China satisfactorily evident. Their best structure, as a spectacle of art, would not rank fourth place compared to what India produced in the seventeenth century, or Europe before or after the Renaissance, or the Ottoman Empire before its final decline. The average Chinese temple, a mangy affair with low roof and wooden beams, has no art about it to speak of, and inside and out is less impressive than an ordinary chop suey joint. The walls of Peiping, built by conquerors of the Chinese, make a profound impression for somber, square-faced immensity. But there the effect is perhaps as much from the spirit of history about them and from the setting as from the walls themselves. City walls at large in China were never anything impressive as works of art or architecture, being usually of roughly fitted stones for a frame with a dirt filler. I have never seen the ruins of Aztec or Mayan cities, but photographs and reading leave the conclusion that the Chinese apogee of architectural spirit did not exceed that of those peoples. Certainly it came nowhere near that of Angkor in what is now French Indo-China. One of the most surprising features of Chinese architecture is that outstanding permanent monuments of any kind are scarce. Their temples in their heyday were rarely built for permanence, and accordingly no very old ones are to be seen. Nothing in Chinese records indicates that any particularly fine ones ever existed. The traveler looking for signs of antiquity in China will not find many in their buildings. Where Rome and Greece abound with really noble edifices standing recognizable after more than two thousand years, China has none. For a land where building stone was plentiful in areas of foremost culture, this is a strange inconsistency. Possibly their veneration for the past banished all desire to memorialize themselves for posterity in architecture. But it is odd, with their respect for graves, that no notable mausoleums were built in the past, as in India and Egypt, despite an equal abundance of cheap or free labor. page 48 The Chinese inherently love civic tranquillity, and yet historically and at the present time they are among the bloodiest and most turbulent of nations. Their language is chock full of proverbs about peace and good will, and yet a short walk through any native Chinese street will reveal more family rows, angry bickerings over trifles and more general quarreling than anywhere else in the world. No other people approach them in their exalted veneration for learning, and yet at all times only a microscopic few could so much as read and write, while probably not one in forty can do so today. They are famed for their prudence in money matters, yet their love of gambling amounts to such an insane passion that every year millions are ruined to become beggars or suicides. They achieved certain principles of democracy long before any Western country, yet nowhere has tyranny been traditionally so fierce and oppressive, nor is it today anywhere else so outrageously cruel. They are the least warlike of nations, yet the constant bloodshed through the centuries in China appalls the historians, and China today has probably more soldiers under arms than all the rest of the world combined. They are among the most ingenious of peoples in making the most out of their natural resources, yet tens of millions never get enough to eat. pages 50–52 In Western thought and moral philosophy, we are accustomed to regard certain impulses as common to all mankind, and assertive under the same conditions among all normal individuals. Some of these impulses, residence in China soon teaches, are certainly not common to all mankind, very definitely not to the Chinese. Occidentals are disposed to think of gratitude, for example, as an instinctive response to consideration and kindness, resulting in at least an impulse in the beneficiary to exempt the beneractor from malice that might be held toward other fellow men. Not so in China. Efforts in behalf of a Chinese do not mean that that Chinese will assuredly show any extra regard for the persons extending assistance. He may or he may not. Historically, a few have, and a vastly greater number have not. Gratitude, in the shape of reciprocated kindness and consideration, cannot be expected in the average run of experience with Chinese. Instinctive sympathy is another trait which we in the West are prone to regard as normal in creatures above the brute. But this view certainly cannot include all the human family. In much of China-perhaps all of it, I am not personally sure-Chinese traveling in small passenger boats up and down the rivers commonly travel two together. The reason is that if one becomes ill while traveling alone, the captain or boat owner of the Chinese raft will at once toss him off and abandon him on the superstition that if he should die on board the event might bring bad luck to the boat. Hence a passenger will take a relative or a trusted friend, or a friend he hopes he can trust, by way of a safeguard, to intervene and perhaps save his life should sudden illness develop. Apologists for the Chinese point out that in such a case the boat captain is merely following the rigid superstitions he has inherited, and for which he is not in his ignorance responsible. But there seems more to the matter than that. I have never seen, and I have not encountered any one else who has seen, a Chinese stricken with grief in the act of fulfilling his obligations of superstition against the evident dictates of human feeling. What we see among them is complete indifference to supreme distress in any one not of their immediate family or associations, even where the most trifling effort would assist the afflicted person. Anywhere and at almost any time in China, you can see a cart fallen on a man or a horse, or some similar accident, plentiful in the crowded streets, with curious onlookers not stirring a hand to lift the injured out of his predicament. This indifference to fellow suffering seems by all evidence to be distinctly Oriental. The anecdote of the Good Samaritan in the Bible suggests that an unwillingness to aid a suffering stranger was the established etiquette around Palestine at that time, since the Good Samaritan who lent a hand, and did nothing more than almost any passing motorist would do in similar circumstances among us today, was looked upon as a highly exceptional chap. At corresponding stages of civilization and culture, most Occidental races appear to have exhibited vastly greater advances in the cultivation of fellow- feeling than most Oriental races. The earliest records that survive of the Greeks, the Romans, Britons and other Europeans, indicate that ready assistance to a fellow creature was general where no enmity prevailed. And we may gather from accounts of American Indian fighting that those forest savages would at times make strenuous efforts to rescue a wounded brave on a field of conflict, even when the brave was not a close family connection of the potential rescuers. In fact, manifestations of this emotion we commonly regard as human appear now and then among the higher forms of four- footed life. African game hunters present well-authenticated accounts of such occurrences as a badly wounded elephant being assisted to cover by his comrades. And any one who has witnessed the wailing grief of a herd of seals at the death of one of their number will never believe that the impulses of sympathy and sorrow, as distinct from a realization of personal loss, are absent among them. But the Chinese appear to be one of the notable exceptions to the higher zoölogy. The interesting evidence in the matter is not only that throughout their ancient centuries of advances in other particulars they failed to develop any credo of fellow- sympathy. It is that they appear to have in the very crib and core of their molecules almost complete insulation against its infection. Moral philosophers and religious propagandists have not been lacking through the centuries to urge upon them a more generous personal outlook. But with deceptive initial successes here and there, quickly expiring, aims of altering Chinese character in the matter of engendering ideas of fellow-feeling have failed. It is not maintained by thinking observers that the Chinese cannot be changed in this respect. It is simply that their resistance to such change has been shown to be victorious to date, and is still as stanch as ever. pages 54-55 Arthur Smith, who died in California last year after lifelong work in China, has in one of his books on Chinese character an observation the truth of which impresses itself on a foreigner more and more, the longer he lives among the Chinese: "Nobody trusts anybody else in China, for the excellent reason that he knows that under similar circumstances he could not be trusted himself." Smith was a missionary, one nineteenth century, heart and soul devoted to the uplift and improvement of the Chinese, one of the ablest foreign friends the Chinese ever had, and the man who induced Theodore Roosevelt to give back to China the unpaid installments of the Boxer indemnity fund. But Smith's devotion as a friend of the Chinese did not unfit him as a critic, nor make him indisposed to acknowledge the inescapably evident traits universal among the people he desired to serve. He recognized, as only a very few philanthropic workers in China today recognize, that the best service to China would come out of an honest acceptance of the differences inherent in Chinese as compared with some other races. the outstanding Americans in China during the last half of the But going back to the subject of Chinese cruelty, overwhelmingly evident every day everywhere in the country, a few samples of regular practices are illustrative. For instance, a man who falls overboard from a boat not manned by members of his family or close associates need not expect to be picked up. Falling overboard, it may be mentioned, is not an infrequent occurrence among Chinese, who are naturally careless. Almost any veteran foreigner who has traveled up and down the rivers of China will be able to recount one or more cases where he has personally observed a man drown without efforts to save him by other Chinese a few feet away on shore or in a boat. An American Consul related to me a personally witnessed occurrence one that strikes a Westerner as incredible, but which would not impress a native Chinese as anything remarkable. It happened that a sampan loaded down with a cargo of live pigs, and crowded also with Chinese, was caught in a treacherous current and overturned a little distance from the shore. The Chinese and pigs aboard were spilled out into the water. A number of other Chinese along the shore, seeing the upset, immediately put out to the scene in their own boats, and began greedily picking up the live pigs swimming about. The drowning and pleading humans who wailed to be taken aboard were knocked on the head as fast as they swam to the arriving boats, and were all washed downstream and drowned. The Chinese minute men of the sampans returned in high glee with their unexpected catch of fresh pork, and life went on as usual. a place up the Yangtze where he was stationed, Once I was present at a Chinese dinner, the main guests at which were several ranking officers in one of the Chinese "loyal" armies. These officers were vastly above the common run. As I recall, two or more of them had been educated in Japan, up till recently the main training ground for educated Chinese officers. Several of the Chinese present spoke English, and as my knowledge in English. It appeared that in a recent campaign a group of higher officers had been captured, and a colloquy followed to decide how they should die. The means finally chosen was that each of the captured officers should be forced to eat a handful of loose needles. After this relish, they were lined up for their captors to watch the effects of this diet. They died in about two hours. Mandarin was feeble, they put in an explanation of the conversation now and then for me pages 103-105 A few centuries ago, when China was a nation enlightened to a greater degree than any of its neighbors in the matter of arms and munitions, Malay pirates were troubling the South China coast. The pirates evidently made raids now and then upon the coast villages, settled temporarily and then took sail again. To break up this practice, the Emperor of China issued orders that all Chinese residents along that coast should remove inland a certain number of miles. For, he reasoned in his instructions, if there was nothing valuable along the coast for the pirates to come after, they would cease to trouble the Flowery Kingdom. At that time, theoretically, China was the strongest power on earth, yet she withdrew in alarm before a few small prahus full of naked Malays. Had the pirates set up residence on the coast, Chinese talents could have met the problem handily-the Chinese could simply have outlied them and outbred them. But an issue of swords and spears, though the Chinese possessed many thousand times the resources of the invaders, filled them with terror. In the journal of a traveler of a century ago among the Mongols-frontier nomads of the farmer Chinese Empire-we find that the lament of the Mongols was that while the Chinese would not fight them, their wheedling traders, pawnbrokers and the like managed progressively by flattery, skilled deception and eternal thrift to reduce them to a state of impoverished subjection. Of the differences we see between various races, this absence of physical courage in the Chinese is perhaps a characteristic instinctively repellent to Anglo-Saxons. It is coupled, of course, with Chinese distaste for any kind of vigorous physical endeavor. No one ever saw or heard of a typical Chinese engaging in any sort of sport requiring activity. They are the one large group of the world's population having absolutely no traditions of physical contests for the mere exhilaration of feeling the play of muscles asked in bewilderment why he plays tennis, or why he rides a horse without appearing to go to any definite destination. A frequent query is, "Why don't you hire coolies to bat the ball around and sit down and watch?" With the tens of thousands of Chinese men in foreign schools equipped with gymnasiums and often with physical education directors, it is interesting that there are no Chinese athletes. And even among the Chinese adopted and brought up in foreign families, reluctance to exercise appears strong. Those slant-eyed, yellow-faced tennis players you see on American campuses are nearly always Japanese, not Chinese. Efforts are being made in foreign or foreignized schools in China to introduce outdoor sports, but any one watching the results can see that it is something mightily against the grain. friendly rivalry. Almost every veteran foreigner in contact with native Chinese has been Chinese jugglers and acrobats are practically outcasts according to Chinese traditions, and special laws existed against them until recent years. The profession was hereditary, and one of the lowest. Profit was the motive, not zeal of an athletic sort. This absence of lusty physical exhilaration evidently accounts for the poor showing of Chinese in warfare, and with this in mind, any talk of the Chinese being a world power as soon as they gain adequate scientific knowledge is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, China for more than seventy-five years has had very able foreign military advisers, and dozens of elaborate munitions and arms plants have been built under foreign direction. Then as soon as the foreign director's contract has expired in each, and the plant is turned over to Chinese graduates of American scientific schools, it goes to rust and ruin in short order, or German ex-officers have been available at low cost, China's armies have been very plentifully supplied with them. But as the missionaries fail to give the Chinese character, foreign military advisers fail to give them courage. This is not a matter of ignorance and poor training. Northwest frontier tribesmen of India incorporated into British forces fight with passionate determination, though as illiterate as the Chinese. it remains open, operates very incompetently. Particularly since the World War, when pages 218-219 It is something to get used to, in China, to reckon with catastrophes in terms of millions of lives. In any serious flood or famine year the victims drowned or starved will run into the millions. In the one campaign of modern times in China where there was persisting vehemence in fighting-the Taiping Rebellion-twenty million persons perished. That total is approved by reliable foreigners who viewed the havoc. It ranks as the most stupendous slaughter in all history, exceeding in direct deaths the losses from the World War. Today in a few parts of China the population has not recovered its density, after two generations, from the Taiping massacres, and the land seized by surviving peasants is held in a sort of feudal manorial manner, with the holders hiring coolie labor from other areas to tend it. But during the present century, and through most of their past, the Chinese have not followed initial victories in the Taiping manner. Losses from exposure and starvation in the constant strife, however, may be believed to exceed in China in the last fifteen years the total killed in the World War. It is rare in present Chinese strife for a victorious army to pursue a defeated foe vigorously. Advancing into conquered territory both the officers and the troops tend to eat and r--- their way into a lazy lassitude. And then there seems to operate a really characteristic instinct against pushing anything to termination. Chinese dread finality. They prefer to keep matters dangling, with definitive action eternally postponed. The strategy of settling things by striking while the iron is hot, so to speak, never seems to enter into their military calculations. Hence it is common for an army to set out against another with all sorts of ballyhoo about intended annihilation, yet when the two armies clash along the skirmish line, both will lapse into a torpid poise, and remain face to face for months with nothing happening. The soldiers of each army will fraternize with the other, with many desertions across the lines both ways. page 236 Slavery in Fukien is fairly widespread, though no figures, or even acceptable estimates, are available. This applies to most of China. Slaves-other Chinese-are not held by individual owners in large numbers. They are men and women and children sold, usually, under duress of poverty. As well as I could gather, slavery is hereditary, and the child of a slave is a slave in the family where the parent is owned. There are possibly as many slaves in China now as there were in America before the Civil War. Any estimate, however, is a guess. Evidently the hereditary feature is commonly invalidated by the practice of taking women slaves as concubines. In any event, there is no distinct class of slaves, seemingly, long perpetuated from generation to generation. pages 314-316 This talent for mollifying superior strength in an emergency must be a very ancient gift with the Chinese. In the thirteenth century Jenghis Khan, who spared few of those who resisted him, spared the Chinese. It is said that in a blast of fury he first resolved to exterminate the last man, woman and child of the country and make of China a vast pasture for his army's horses, then relented and set about the extermination of other empires. His descendants fell into Chinese ideas of luxury; and within a hundred years the posterity of the famous Jenghis had been largely absorbed by the Chinese, who went on puddling their rice fields as if nothing had happened. An approximate repetition of this took place after the Manchus came out of the forests of Manchuria and conquered the Chinese in 1644, though the Manchus staved off dissolution by forbidding intermarriage f Manchus with Chinese and by taking other precautions. Proper appreciation of this Chinese ability in gaining sympathy is essential to intelligent diplomatic dealings with them. Yet it is nearly impossible for people without residence in China to appreciate the extent to which tears, plaints, and all sorts of sympathy-winning actions can be simulated by Chinese in the most cold-blooded spirit of gaining an end. For every Chinese, from highest to lowest, all the acts of life are concentrated upon extracting, from those who mean nothing to him, what he can for the benefit of himself and his clan. Just as all creatures wage the battle of life with the best weapons given them by nature, the Chinese wage theirs with their foremost weapon-acting. They have no talent for warfare. They are not inventive. They cannot compete in industrial organization. They are at heart seemingly immune to the loyalties by which national unity might be achieved to give them greater strength. Thus about all that is left to them protectively is their remarkable ability to detect the emotional susceptibilities of opponents, and to attack these with the display best calculated to achieve the desired results. The display may be designed to induce sympathy, to mollify anger, to inspire generosity, or to flatter conceit. But the Chinese are adept at deciding what method is best, and before this talent many a sturdy diplomat has given way against the accusations of his rational self in the manner that Samson melted in the arms of the cooing Delilah. It is as natural for a Chinese to employ the words, looks, and gestures that will win his point-usually sympathy-from another in an emergency as it is for a 'possum to feign death. Against such inherent talents, of affected emotion, perfected by practice in almost every act of a Chinese's life from infancy on, our American traditions provide no adequate defense. If they tamed Genghis Kahn, the toughest opponent mankind has seen since the dawn average American obviously has a poor chance. history, the simple-hearted And when it comes to money we should recognize that the Chinese are as hard as rocks. The gracious manner that Americans associate with generosity is often conspicuous in the Chinese, and as hosts they are generous in their hospitality. But as for generosity of attitude toward money in the sense of subordinating it to anything else, the Chinese are out of our ken altogether. The evidences of this are abundant. For example, at a Chinese wedding there is always a bookkeeper at the door to take presents. He enters in a book the amount of the guest's present, if it is cash, or an exact itemization and appraisal of it if it is in goods. A "spotter," something like those employed in certain American quicklunch restaurants, roams nearby to make note of anybody who squeezes in without giving anything, in case the throng is too great for the bookkeeper to do the spotting. This system is intended to measure the exact degree of obligation incurred by the family toward all comers. Should one of the guests later have a wedding in his own house, he will get a present of exactly the same value as he gave, not a penny more. To an American it sounds jarring to hear "Five dollars" or "Ten dollars" called aloud as his envelope of red tissue paper is torn open and the amount swiftly counted as he passes inside to accept the hospitality tendered in phrases of elaborate humility upon the invitation he has received. This system is a very sinuous, graceful Chinese way of "facing" the guest into giving a fair sum. It is a first-rate device particularly with the Chinese, who are keenly sensitive to public criticism. No one wants to hear a miserably small sum called after his name within hearing of all the other guests. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001871542

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